Posts Tagged ‘blog’

All day, every day, I’m thinking about my clients and how to make their organizations rise above their competitors and become more successful. If you’re like me, you focus on the company, the brand, and the image. But what about us? Are you working on your own personal brand?

When you’re out looking for a job or if you’re in the consulting business like me, you’re looking for people to hire you based on you. Your background, your abilities, your personality, your connections all come into play. When you submit your resume, you want it to be memorable. You want to be memorable. There is real value to that end in building a brand.

Today, the tools for building a personal brand have never been more accessible or powerful. At the beginning of the year, I set a goal. If you type in “Jeff York” in Google, I’m aiming to come up first. Unfortunately, I’m handicapped by having a common name. I’m also challenged by having the same name of an actor that had a long successful career from the ’30s through the ’50s. But he died 13 years ago so hopefully I will have some success.

So what can you do to build your own personal brand? Blogs such as this one help. Joining networking websites such as LinkedIn also help. I would suggest that you spend some time reading some of the experts in the field. Efforts put toward this endeavor will pay substantial dividends today and into the future.

Make your own brand. If you can’t market yourself, why would you think an organization would want to pay you to market them?

The road to that sentence hasn’t been as easy or as smooth as the simplicity of those two words might suggest. You see, I’ve been resisting blogs. For the longest time, I’ve been of the opinion that there are so many blogs out there, why add another?

Now I have that answer. It’s because I have something to say. I had something to say before. I just had to believe in blogs as an interesting and viable means to delivering messages. I’ve seen the light and I’ve come to the church. I hope people will read. More importantly, I hope people will write. I believe strongly in the communications model which includes the concept of “feedback.” Please let me know what you think of my ideas and concepts.

I’m in marketing. More precisely, my background is in using mass mediums to get messages out. I’ve produced pieces that have aired on local television up to national broadcast and cable networks. The logistics of getting spots to air may differ, but the basic premise is the same; there are typically 30 seconds (900 frames) to use to bombard the sight and sound senses…make sure none go to waste. Be effective. Be memorable. Be good.

Now enter the Internet. Now the number of seconds and/or frames are almost exclusively up to the storyteller. So is sorting through the possible methods of delivery. You can’t just say you make Internet video. That can mean anything from beautiful sellable HD podcasts to shaky home footage of someone’s daughter dancing on stage uploaded on YouTube. You have to pick your effective channel(s), pair it with a business model that makes sense, and get the message out. That last part has been one incredible challenge. I’m struggling with that last concept. But I rather suspect the answer lies in our past: